Ask a Hostage Negotiator

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Taking QuestionsAsk a Hostage Negotiator

Frank A. Bolz Jr., a founder of the New York Police Department's hostage-negotiation team is taking reader questions.

“Every one is a life-and-death job,” Frank A. Bolz Jr., one of the founders of the New York Police Department's hostage-negotiating unit, said of hostage situations. For a decade, Captain Bolz, a detective captain, was the city's chief negotiator, handling about 285 incidents that brought the safe release of 850 hostages from airplanes, buses, supermarkets and banks.

When people asked him what was his toughest job was, he would always reply “the next one.”

“No matter how good your record has been,” he said, “it's a new roll of the dice. You don't know who you're dealing with.”

This week, Captain Bolz, who retired from the department in 1982 but continues to work as a consultant, will take your questions on City Room. Ask him about his career, hostage situations in New York City, how to be a hostage and survive, or other questions relating to the field in the comments box below.

His first set of responses will be published on Wednesday.

After the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Captain Bolz helped put together the Police Department's “Guidelines for Barricaded Felons and Hostage Confrontations,” which encouraged conversation, firearm discipline and patience over the use of force.

But it took several high-profile incidents in New York City, including a botched bank robbery at a Chase Manhattan bank in Gravesend, Brooklyn, (which would inspire the film “Dog Day Afternoon”) and a 47-hour siege with 13 hostages at a sporting goods store in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in January 1973, before the Police Department implemented a program to train detectiv e-negotiators.

The first class graduated in April 1973, and since then, Captain Bolz has trained representatives from more than 4,000 law enforcement agencies around the country and the world - including the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the State Department and the United Nations - in the techniques his team pioneered.

Since his retirement from the police department, Captain Bolz, now 82, has worked as a consultant, providing expertise to law enforcement agencies, journalists, novelists, the motion picture industry and as an expert court witness.